


All Possible Titles Sound Like Clickbait

by NoisyNoiverns



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Friendly competition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:33:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6662650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoisyNoiverns/pseuds/NoisyNoiverns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nihlus finds Saren working out (for once) and suggests a friendly competition. It doesn't end entirely as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Possible Titles Sound Like Clickbait

Usually, when Nihlus went to work out, the room was empty. Saren would be sleeping, or eating, or making sure the ship was flying smoothly, or (on extremely rare occasions) doing paperwork. So when he walked into the open area that served as a gym on Saren’s ship to find Saren, shirtless and with one arm behind his back while he did push-ups, to say he was taken aback would be an understatement.

He clamped his jaws and mandibles around a startled chirp, more out of habit from Saren’s training than actual desire to be quiet. Saren hadn’t appeared to notice him, facing away with his eyes trained on the ground. He chose to take a moment to admire the rare view outside of the bedroom- Saren’s thin, tapering waist, the slender slope of his cowl, his broad, powerful shoulders, the beautifully wicked curve of the claws curled in the small of his back, and of course the almost ethereal allure of his plates, white as Palaven’s moons and, at just the right angle, almost as luminescent.

Sometimes it just snuck up on him how really, incredibly gay he was. And then there were times like this, when it just up and whacked him upside the head with an I-beam.

He finally coughed into his fist, then walked further into the room, trying to seem nonchalant and like he definitely hadn’t just been entertaining a number of suddenly-very-feasible fantasies that had popped into his head. “I didn’t think you even remembered this room existed.”

Saren’s head popped up, and he paused in his routine to watch Nihlus cross the room to the dumbbell set. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Nihlus snorted gently. “So you came to do push-ups with your shirt off. Planning anything?”

“You spend too much time on the extranet.” Saren’s head went back down, and he switched which arm was holding him up before resuming his workout.

Nihlus shook his head and started turning the dumbbells over, trying to find the right ones. “Oh, I don’t know, there’s some pretty decent stuff on the extranet. There was this _gorgeous_ woman once, nice waist, pretty markings…”

Saren grunted. “I have no interest in women. You know that.”

“Yes, yes, you only like the company of other men, I know. You’re only the gayest man I’ve ever met.” He snorted and ran a talon along the side of the rack, an idea flitting through his head. “Hey, Saren.”

“No.”

He scowled. “You didn’t even hear the question.”

“I never like any of your ideas that begin with ‘hey, Saren.’ It’s a safe assumption.”

“Humor me.”

“I never like any of _those_ ideas, either.”

“You’re hilarious. Look, we’re stuck in this ship until we get back to the Citadel, it’s just a harmless idea for a little competition, nothing awful. Just a little fun.”

Saren paused to give him a distinctly unimpressed look, then sighed and sat up. “I’m going to regret this.”

“You always say that.” He shook his head slightly and took a few steps to one side, now looking at the weights. “Weight-lifting competition, you versus me. Keep one-upping each other until somebody quits, loser has to check the thing in the back of the fridge for sentience. And using your biotics is cheating, of course.”

Saren blinked slowly at him, then sighed and got up off the floor. “As long as I don’t have to eat it.”

“When have I ever wanted you to eat it?”

“Remember the fish sandwiches?”

Nihlus’s stomach churned, remembering the last time he’d made a bet with Saren, over who could parkour up to their apartment the fastest. He’d lost by barely a second. “Okay, fair point. No eating, promise.”

Saren rolled his shoulders and wandered over to Nihlus, grabbing a bar as he passed. “Do you want to start, or shall I?”

Nihlus flicked a mandible sharply. “I will. You’d just start at, what, a bazillion?”

“That’s not a real number.”

“You know what I mean,” Nihlus said idly, selecting a decent amount of weight off the rack. “How’s fifty sound for a start?”

“It sounds like you’re setting the bar low enough you could walk over it,” Saren said with a vaguely amused twitch of his mandibles, offering him the bar.

Nihlus rolled his eyes and snatched it out of his hand, then walked over to the rack to start setting up. “I’m not letting you bait me into starting at, I don’t know, three hundred or whatever.”

“Pity.” Saren drifted over to stand by his head as he got down on his back. “Do you need me to get it off the rack for you, too?”

“Very funny.” Nihlus huffed and settled his hands on the bar, took a moment to make sure he had a good grip, then lifted it off the rack and started his set.

Saren always paced when he spotted. He never went beyond the edges of the rack, and always stayed close enough to reach out and grab the bar if Nihlus needed it, but it was unnerving all the same. On a rational level, he knew Saren wouldn’t let him get hurt, and that even if he was too far away to catch the bar, biotics would do the trick for him. But on the other hand, there was always that little niggling voice in the back of his head suggesting Saren wouldn’t catch it in time and he’d end up with a big, heavy bar slamming down onto his face.

He forced himself to stick to maybe a quarter of his usual set, wanting to save his strength. By the time he’d gotten off the bench, Saren had already disappeared back to the weight rack, idly dragging his talons along the top. “Take the fifty off,” he said, subvocals a mix of disinterest and order.

Even as Nihlus did as he was bid, he fluttered his mandibles and snorted. “Feeling a bit cocky, are we?”

Saren didn’t respond, lifting a couple new weights off the rack and carrying them over. Nihlus read the numbers off the side, then snorted again. “A hundred? Really?”

He was pretty sure Saren was just deliberately ignoring him now, moving to put the new weight on the bar without comment. Nihlus rolled his eyes and drifted over to him, standing in the spotter’s position Saren had vacated and watching as Saren started lifting. If he was totally honest, he was a bit more interested in watching Saren than spotting him; Saren was an impressive specimen of a turian, if you asked Nihlus, and while he tended to show off whenever he got the chance, that chance almost invariably occurred during battle, when Nihlus was more focused on not dying than watching. He had to take these opportunities when they presented themselves.

Saren, Nihlus had learned over the years, was deceptively slight. He was small and slender, with a trim waist and fragile-looking limbs. The only parts of him that betrayed the brute strength he possessed were his broad shoulders, muscular thighs, and biceps that had held Nihlus’s head in a vice grip on more than one occasion. Watching him bench-press over two-thirds his own weight, Nihlus had to admit, was more than a little tantalizing.

He really, _really_ needed to stop reading shitty ten-credit romance novels in spaceports for lack of anything better to do. They were making his internal monologue all flowery and shit.

Saren’s set was over much too soon for Nihlus’s liking, and he had to very quickly switch his gaze from Saren’s arms back to the weight bar as Saren carefully put it back in place. “You can surrender now, if you want to spare yourself the embarrassment of dropping weight on your keel,” Saren said as he stood up, subvocals an even mix of arrogance and teasing.

Nihlus rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right,” he said, trudging back to the weight rack and grabbing another set of fifty. “It’s a wonder your head doesn’t split from the strain of holding that ego of yours.”

Saren fluttered his mandibles good-naturedly, drifting out of the way so Nihlus could slide the new weight on. Because Saren making any expression that wasn’t some degree of “annoyed” was totally no reason to be concerned.

As he did the next set, Nihlus kept his eyes on Saren, at least as best he could. His face was impassive, his subvocals silent. But there was something decidedly unnerving about his eyes. Bright and, dare Nihlus say it, mischievous, Saren’s eyes had that unsettling gleam they got whenever he was plotting. A vain part of Nihlus hoped it was related to how Nihlus was currently benching Saren’s own weight, and the potential applications of that outside of weight-lifting.

Yeah. Right. Nihlus supposed he could always dream.

After a few more reps, he set the bar back in its place and sat up, twisting to look at Saren with one brow plate raised and his mandibles lowered. “So, are you going to do something evil, or just keep staring at me like you’re debating the best way to put me out the highest window in the Citadel Tower?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Nihlus,” Saren said with a flick of his mandibles, and just like that the gleam in his eyes was gone, replaced by a guarded, carefully disinterested look.

Nihlus snorted softly, then pushed himself to his feet. “Whatever. Want me to go get you another set of fifty?”

“No.”

Nihlus raised a brow plate. “Then are you giving up?”

“Again, no.”

Before Nihlus was fully aware of what was happening, he felt a hand on his wrist followed by a sharp yank, and he yelped as Saren hoisted him over his head, letting go for half a second so Saren could get his hands positioned properly before Nihlus landed. With a jolt, Nihlus noticed a distinct lack of the usual electricity coursing through his body- Saren hadn’t used his biotics at all.

Okay, that was kind of hot.

Saren adjusted his grip so he had one hand on the back edge of Nihlus’s cowl and the other splayed in the small of his back. Then, with a smug, subvocalized hum, Saren slowly sank until his keelbone almost touched his knees, then raised back up, keeping Nihlus evenly balanced on his shoulders all the while.

He was fucking doing _squats_ , with _Nihlus_ as the weight.

Nihlus let out a low groan. “I don’t believe this is actually happening to me.”

“Hush, Nihlus,” Saren said, subvocals a mix of reproach and amusement. Smug asshole.

Nihlus rolled his eyes and let his head loll back against his cowl. “Just so you know, Saren,” he said dryly, “this is quite possibly the most stupidly gay thing you’ve _ever_ done to show off.”

Saren made a strange noise, one Nihlus had only heard once before. “If you think _this_ is bad,” he said, while Nihlus was still trying to work out the sound he’d just heard, “you should have seen Desolas mooning over this one lieutenant knocking him to the floor.”

They fell silent, and as Saren sank into another squat, it struck Nihlus just what he’d heard.

Saren had laughed.


End file.
